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For at least six years, law-enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had
routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of
decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National
Security Agency’s collection of phone logs.

The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that
has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government
and the telecommunications giant.

The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units across the country.
Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and
supply them with the logs from as far back as 1987.

The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government
programs, including the NSA’s gathering of phone logs under the Patriot Act. The NSA stores the
data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of
calls, for five years. Unlike the NSA data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the
locations of callers.

Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not only those made by
AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training
slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some 4 billion
records are added to the database every day, the slides say.

The slides were given to
The New York Times by Drew Hendricks, a peace activist in Port Hadlock, Wash. He said he
had received the PowerPoint presentation, which is unclassified but marked “Law enforcement
sensitive,” in response to a series of public-information requests to West Coast police
agencies.

The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great
secrecy.

The Obama administration acknowledged the extraordinary scale of the Hemisphere database and the
unusual embedding of AT&T employees in government drug units.

But they said the project employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for
decades.